Suncast

When Charlotte Meerstadt put solar on her Amsterdam home, the numbers made sense.Then Charlotte moved to the U.S. and rented out the apartment. The solar panels kept doing exactly what they were supposed to do: producing cheap, clean power. But, while the tenant received the lower utility bill, Charlotte still owned the panels and had no clear way to capture the savings her asset was creating.That mismatch revealed a bigger problem hiding across rental housing and distributed energy: the person who can invest in clean energy is often not the same person who gets the financial benefit.Under 1% of rental rooftops have solar.Now put that next to 49 million rental units in the U.S., including roughly 23 million apartments, and you start to see the size of the opportunity Charlotte Meerstadt stumbled into.In this episode, Charlotte, Founder and CEO of Fram Energy, joins Nico to explain how she turned that insight into a company helping property owners, developers, and energy asset owners measure, bill, an

Germany has turned plug-in solar from a fringe idea into a mainstream energy product found in millions of homes. And the biggest lessons for the U.S. aren't really about solar panels.They're about making solar easier.In this Tactical Tuesday, CraftStrom Co-Founder and CEO Stephan Scherer shares what nearly a decade in the European plug-in solar market taught him about how a new energy category actually scales.Simplicity matters as much as technology. Germany had to simplify registration and remove requirements that made a supposedly plug-and-play product harder to adopt.Policy needs to separate different problems. Electrical safety inside the home and how much power a system exports to the grid aren't the same thing—and Stephan argues that conflating them could unnecessarily limit the U.S. market.And perhaps most importantly, the category scales when it becomes easy to buy and easy to understand. In Germany, plug-in solar eventually moved beyond specialist channels and onto mainstream retail shelves.

The best technology does not always win.Sass Peress has spent nearly four decades learning why. Since entering solar in 1988, he has built companies, introduced new technologies, sold hundreds of thousands of solar products, backed ideas that worked, backed at least one that did not, and learned firsthand what separates an exciting invention from something customers will actually buy.One of his most useful distinctions is between “bleeders” and “leaders.” Being first can mean paying for every lesson the rest of the market gets to learn from you. The companies that survive know how to stay tenacious without becoming stubborn, change direction when the evidence demands it, and stop falling in love with their own technology.Sass and Nico dig into the early entrepreneurial experiences that shaped him, why “claims are packaging,” what selling 250,000 solar chargers taught him about finding the right customer, and why great salespeople sell outcomes rather than features or pain.They also explore supercapac

While many solar companies are fighting to stay afloat, Exact Solar is flying.After growing 23% and then 50% in the previous two years, the Pennsylvania installer says it's up another 73% so far this year. That kind of growth in this market raises an obvious question: what are they doing differently?Aaron Nichols joins Nico once more to unpack the answer, and it isn't just one clever marketing tactic.Exact has built a growth flywheel around learning. Completed projects become proof the sales team can use. Customer questions become content. Pleased customers become referral sources. Advertising results inform the next campaign. And years of accumulated experience are increasingly becoming searchable institutional knowledge that helps the team respond faster and sell smarter.Aaron breaks down exactly how Exact brought more of its advertising in-house, built systems to stay in front of past customers, turned community partnerships into new opportunities, and used AI to make what the company already know

America needs more power. Data centers are accelerating demand, utilities are planning billions of dollars in new infrastructure, and households will ultimately help pay for much of it.But what if we invested some of that money in the households themselves?Ari Matusiak, co-founder and CEO of Rewiring America, makes the case that homes can become a meaningful part of America’s energy infrastructure—and that households should be compensated for the value they provide to the grid.In this wide-ranging conversation, Ari and Nico explore the rise of Homegrown Energy, why the old equilibrium between utilities and customers is breaking down, how hyperscalers could help fund household energy upgrades, and where regulators and utilities are already testing what’s possible.They also get into the harder question underneath all of it: who gets to participate in the value created as we build out the grid?For Ari, the opportunity is bigger than electrification. If households can provide real value to the grid, the

En Latinoamérica, la oportunidad no siempre está donde se anuncia más capacidad, sino donde existe una combinación real de demanda, capital comprometido y capacidad de ejecución.Nico Johnson conversa con Juan Manuel Carbajosa, Director de Ventas para Latinoamérica de Shoals Technologies, y Mario Gomez, Presidente de TCI GECOMP. Juntos aportan dos perspectivas complementarias para entender el mercado: la de un responsable global de desarrollo de negocio que habla con decenas de operadores y la de un operador regional con décadas de experiencia construyendo proyectos en varios países.A partir de esa experiencia combinada, la conversación aborda algunas de las decisiones que hoy más importan para desarrolladores, IPPs, EPCs e inversionistas:

Good companies don't automatically get noticed. And doing good work isn't enough to ensure that customers, investors, journalists, communities, or increasingly AI systems understand why your company matters.Melissa Baldwin has spent more than 20 years exclusively in energy and climate communications. As Senior Vice President at Tigercomm and host of the Scaling Clean podcast, she's had a front-row seat to what helps companies earn attention and trust, and what causes otherwise strong companies to remain largely invisible.Melissa and Nico dig into why communications is routinely underfunded, why executive silence is itself a strategic choice, and what the best companies do differently to become useful sources of information for their markets. Melissa shares examples from Zillow and Redfin, explains why proprietary data can create authority far beyond traditional promotional content, and makes the case for giving CEOs a much larger role in telling the company story.Then they turn to a rapidly changing

Solar construction has always depended on experienced crews adapting to whatever the jobsite throws at them. But what happens when the industry needs to build more projects than its best crews can possibly cover?Cody Houser has spent much of his career on the other side of that problem. Before becoming Director of EPC and Constructability at FTC Solar, he spent eight years running his own construction company, driving piles, building trackers, managing crews as large as 250 people, and experimenting with automated pile driving years before today's wave of solar robotics.His argument for automation starts with something more fundamental than replacing labor: predictability.Robotics can give EPCs a more reliable baseline for daily production. But Cody also explains why the opportunity starts upstream, with trackers and construction workflows designed to make installation simpler and more repeatable, whether the work is performed by humans today or increasingly automated tomorrow. FTC says its Pioneer t

Australia has spent years ahead of many markets on the distributed solar adoption curve. Now it is giving the rest of us an early look at what happens when millions of those systems move from installation into decades of ownership, maintenance, repair, replacement, and eventually recycling.Daniel Lazarus, co-founder and CEO of Industrias Services Group, has built his company around that second act. After years in solar construction, he saw an enormous need for maintenance but also discovered why relatively few companies have figured out how to deliver it profitably at scale.In this conversation, Daniel shares what his team is finding on aging solar assets, from missing documentation and preventable design problems to a 400-kilowatt commercial system that had fallen to essentially zero production. But the larger story is about the business being built around those problems.Daniel explains how Industrias developed a national service network, why process and data matter more than another piece of softwa

Utilities used to plan around relatively predictable demand. That assumption is disappearing.In this opening keynote from Intersolar & Energy Storage North America Midwest, Nico Johnson sits down with 3 utility executives; Bria Shea of Xcel Energy, Andy Plenge of ComEd, and Brice Sheriff of Ameren Illinois to examine what happens when electricity demand can arrive faster than the infrastructure needed to serve it—and distributed energy resources increasingly change how power moves across the grid.The conversation explores the difficult balance between reliability, affordability, and investment; what rising electricity costs actually reflect; the practical constraints to deploying more DERs; and how utilities are rethinking planning for a system with far more uncertainty than the one they inherited.Three utilities operating in different markets arrive at a similar reality: planning the next grid will require more flexibility, better coordination, and new ways of thinking about both customers and t

Pepper Construction has survived the Great Depression, World War II, multiple recessions, and a global pandemic. As the family business approaches its 100th anniversary, its next challenge is not simply surviving another disruption. It is pursuing new opportunities without losing the culture, discipline, and sense of responsibility that carried it this far.Jake Pepper is part of the fourth generation preparing to lead Pepper into that next chapter. His path into the family business was anything but automatic. He resisted joining, studied building science, traded natural gas options, and earned an MBA before returning with a deeper understanding of both the company and the complicated dynamics of a multigenerational enterprise.Jake went on to build Pepper Energy from an initial construction-only solar project while helping the broader company expand into batteries, powered land, and hyperscale data centers. He and Nico explore how new businesses earn trust inside an established company, why each generation may

After building and selling multiple companies, Marc Lopata has learned that the decisions that shape a business are rarely the ones people celebrate. They're the small decisions, made consistently over time, that ultimately determine whether a company lasts.In this conversation, Marc shares the operating philosophy he's developed through decades of building companies, leading teams, and mentoring the next generation of entrepreneurs. From hiring the engineering intern who eventually bought his company to thinking about exit strategies before starting a business, resisting the lure of venture capital, and building teams that don't depend on the founder to succeed, Marc's stories come from solar—but the lessons apply to anyone responsible for leading people, managing risk, and building something meant to last.Expect to learn:⚡ What separates companies that endure from those that don't⚡ Why Marc interviewed 45 candidates before hiring the intern who eventually bought his company⚡ How to think about part

We know how to build power. Every day, the clean energy industry builds more of it.But there's another kind of power that's far more difficult to generate—and arguably even more important.The kind that determines whether an industry continues to grow regardless of who's in office. The kind that shapes public opinion before a project is ever proposed. The kind that makes policymakers think twice before standing in your way.Tom Matzzie has spent his career building both.Before founding CleanChoice Energy, he spent fifteen years building political movements. Today, he's helping build something the clean energy industry has historically lacked: the institutions, relationships, and long-term political capacity that make an industry durable.In this conversation, Tom introduces a phrase I hadn't heard before but haven't stopped thinking about since: mythic power.It's a simple idea with profound implications.What if the real measure of our industry's success isn't how many gigawatts we deploy......but whethe

Few people have had a front-row seat to the evolution of the modern solar industry quite like Jeff Spies.Over four decades, Jeff has helped shape the industry as an engineer, educator, trainer, and founder of Planet Plan Sets, working alongside installers and EPCs to solve the technical and permitting challenges behind thousands of solar and storage projects. That perspective gives him a unique vantage point on how the industry has changed—and what hasn't.In this conversation, Jeff shares lessons from a lifetime in solar, including:⚡ How the earliest days of residential solar still influence the industry today⚡ Why every solar project presents a different challenge—and why experience still matters⚡ What the rapid growth of battery storage means for installers and system designers⚡ Why permitting, engineering, and interconnection remain some of the industry's biggest hurdles⚡ How decades of industry evolution have shaped Jeff's perspective on where solar goes nextWhether you're designing systems, runn

Plug-in solar has the potential to change far more than how or where we install solar panels. I believe it could fundamentally change who gets to participate in the energy transition.I recently sat down with Stephan Scherer, Co-Founder and CEO of CraftStrom, who's spent nearly a decade helping pioneer the plug-in solar market—first in Europe, and now here in the United States. Stephan didn't simply watch this category emerge. He helped move it from a niche idea to a product you can buy off-the-shelf in mainstream retail stores like Aldi and Lidl.In this conversation, Stephan shares what his customers taught him as the market evolved, why the U.S. is now wrestling with many of the same questions Europe faced years ago, and what policymakers, utilities, retailers, installers, and manufacturers should be paying attention to as this category begins taking shape here at home.We also explore one of the biggest surprises from CraftStrom's own customer base: the people buying these systems aren't always who

The most expensive mistakes on a solar project usually aren't made during the install. They're made long before anyone arrives on site.Greg Smith has spent nearly two decades helping installers avoid those mistakes. As one of the solar industry's most respected trainers and educators, and the author of a practical guide to energy storage, he's helped thousands of professionals understand what it takes to build reliable solar and storage systems that perform as intended long after the installation is complete.In this live conversation from the NABCEP conference, Greg and Nico Johnson explore why communication has become the industry's number one service call, how better system design prevents costly callbacks, and why setting realistic homeowner expectations is just as important as selecting the right equipment. Along the way, Greg shares the simple disciplines that separate installers who are constantly troubleshooting from those who build systems that simply work.Expect to learn:

David Holmes has spent decades at the intersection of energy and technology, giving him a front-row seat to one of the biggest shifts our industry has ever faced.As Global Industries CTO at Dell Technologies, he works with utilities, hyperscalers, developers, and data center operators who are all asking the same question: how do we power the rapid growth of AI?But David argues that's only half the story.The bigger opportunity is using AI to make our energy system itself more intelligent. From flexible compute and workload orchestration to long-duration storage, demand response, and the idea of "maximizing every electron," this conversation explores how the relationship between electricity and compute is being fundamentally rewritten.Along the way, David explains why energy has become a board-level conversation inside technology companies, why decades of conventional data center thinking are being challenged, and why the next generation of infrastructure may be defined less by building more generation

Battery recycling is about to become one of the most important pieces of the clean energy transition. But before we can build a true circular economy, there's a problem hiding in plain sight.Today's recycling process often starts by shredding batteries with different chemistries into the same stream, creating inconsistent feedstock that's harder to refine, harder to value, and harder to return to the supply chain.Sheeba Dawood, CEO and co-founder of Minerva Lithium, believes the missing step comes before the shredder. Her team has developed battery chemical fingerprinting technology that identifies battery chemistry before processing, creating more consistent feedstock, improving traceability, and unlocking more value from recycled materials.Along the way, we also explore Sheeba's journey from nanoscience researcher to entrepreneur, why she was carrying business cards as a PhD student, and what motivated her to turn laboratory research into a commercial technology.Expect to learn:

Heather Reams spends her days at the intersection of clean energy and public policy, helping shape conversations with lawmakers about how the U.S. meets rapidly growing electricity demand. As President and CEO of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES), she brings an insider's perspective on the political shifts redefining how Washington talks about solar—and why those shifts matter far beyond Capitol Hill.In this conversation, Heather explains why affordability has become the dominant energy issue in Washington, why permitting reform remains one of the biggest barriers to building new infrastructure, and why solar's greatest political advantage today may be something much simpler than subsidies or ideology: it's ready to be built. Along the way, we explore how Republican engagement with solar is evolving, what changed after the debate over federal tax credits, and why the industry's long-term success still depends on educating policymakers and communities alike.Expect to Learn:

One of the most common assumptions in business is that responsibility should be earned only after years of experience.After more than two decades as a Navy F/A-18 fighter pilot and instructor, Jason Knapp came to a different conclusion: capability often follows responsibility, provided organizations are willing to invest in training, honest feedback, and continuous learning.That philosophy shaped his transition into clean energy, where he worked across battery manufacturing, supply chains, and policy advocacy, helping lawmakers better understand the technologies shaping America's energy future. Now, after years of advocating from outside government, Jason is running for Congress because he believes the people writing energy policy should understand the technologies, industries, and communities those decisions affect.This isn't a conversation about politics. It's about leadership, organizational culture, and why expertise belongs in the rooms where important decisions get made.Expect to learn: